Hello, I have one Arnova KMP511 device, which is (almost) dead since few days ago. Ac/DC adapter get old; electrolytic were bad; got hiccup...So Arnova was powered with unstable voltage during boot sequence and as result of that, it will not boot anymore: well known sequence Arnova logo/blank screen/Arnova logo forever...

I have that device for a few mounts. I have already installed listenlive firmware, but not installed recovery, as it seemed to me that my device was not supported.

I have opened device and connected PC terminal to J4 port. ( because of my background, electronic, component level debug, embedded programing should be ok for me..).

In my opinion, my arnova has OK u-boot image, has ok kernel image (uImage) but has problem with file system. I am not sure how to repair it. I have found some tool for this MCU (like USB_boot) and was able to make backup of the internal sd card. Also I have tried to change root to external mmc, as it is recognized during kernel load, with changing bootargs env, but without success till now.

So now, I am asking you for some help and some new lights on my problem. I have time to repair it...It seems to be (easy) doable, right?I have more materials like pictures, backup images. I can attach them if it is neccessary.

- The housing of the Arnova devices is not designed to be opened and closed. Screws are behind the black grills that are glued to the plastic. Removing the grill is nearly impossible without damage. Glueing it back in such a way that you can not see it was opened is also nearly impossible.

- Most of the Arnova's have the console disabled. This means you can not get the debug output as shown above and also can not send commands etc..

- There are at least 6 or so Arnova hardware/software models. You can not flash one model with the software of another model.

- These devices do not crash because of an ac adapter getting old but simply because the hardware design (done by manufacturer SkyTC) is VERY poor! There are several mistakes in there.

- The MMC version of the device has more issues than the NAND version and MMC is much harder to fix. There were some MMC devices that I could not fix.

- If you have a device that is not operating properly due to hardware issues, loading the RFlink firmware will most of the time not fix anything!

- In the past I did fix dead devices for people. I stopped doing that. Spending many hours on a single device to get it working again simply costs more than that the device is worth. - I released a Listenlive recovery image for non-MMC devices. On working devices installing the recovery mode adds a dual boot feature. When the main filesystem gets damaged (yeah, not IF but WHEN as it is a matter of time and luck) the recovery bootup can fix regular bootmode and give you some more joy.

- I did not release a revocery image for MMC devices because it was not working stable enough.

Hello thanks for your valuable reply. I know that device is so hard to be opened, I have passed that , and that it is cheap and did not wort spending too much time trying to repair it...But this seems to be easy to fix. Device load u boot, load kernel and then cant start init from eMMC. Filesystem is badly damaged.. I was wandering if we have somewhere whole rootfs contents of skyTCs but not in NAND format

Listenlive firmware during update only replaces/adds necessary files? It does not contain the whole rootfs partition?

Hi, thanks that is valuable info. However I have managed to obtain one more (working so far) device of the same type and will try to read again whole eMMC content using usb_boot.exe once I receive it. Even, we do not need to open device for that, as you probably know. If you are interested, I can upload image somewhere and share the link. Maybe there are many devices over the world with (more or less) different hw (I guess maybe wifi, amplifier, buttons/remote MCU, even maybe some gpios are routed differently) but I think that any image will be better than no one.

Its hard to me to understand how we do not backup devices before? You have probably stumble upon some Ingenic document about linux quick start or similar; there is one paragraph explaining how to prepare and boot 4750 processor using only SD card. In short, idea is to make one master SD card and then to dump it contents using usb_boot.exe and sdread cmd. Then using the very same tool (or as solution #2 some SDBurner/or cloner can't remember, but tool is easy downloadable from their ftp site) you can clone SD card...Simply as that (in theory)...We will see

I have received second Arnova, but unfortunately it is not working reliably, or not working at all.. It has similar problem, well known timebomb, or whatsever - definately a software problem with missing files...That is a bad news. It is with original software, no ll upgrade.

I can see that maybe up to 10 or 15 files are with Input/Output error(something like bold text lines in log attached). So I will need those files to get working device once again. I will search for them over the net, will see if I will success, but I was thinking to ask some kind people from here for help: For example is there any way to unpack yaffs2 image from arnova MTD recovery? I suspect that all data are there: so close and so far in the same time... I have tried with some more or less linux generic tools, but did not success till now.

Second good news is that usb_boot.exe method for Arnova recovery will work as it seems now. I have uploaded raw image, downloaded from the second Arnova, to the first one, and now both devices are in the very same state - means coming to linux shell SD writing operation is reasonably fast, for example ~500Mb is transferred and written in <5minutes.

It seems to me that usb_boot.exe works similar as dd command in linux .